Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes

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History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

Friedrich Nietzsche
When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

Friedrich Nietzsche
No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man is more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.

Friedrich Nietzsche
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

Friedrich Nietzsche
The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche
What I really want from Music: That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October...

Friedrich Nietzsche
A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Friedrich Nietzsche
For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps no philosopher is more correct than the cynic. The happiness of the animal, that thorough cynic, is the living proof of cynicism.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring.

Friedrich Nietzsche
But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The only thing of interest in a refuted system is the personal element. It alone is what is forever irrefutable.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Shadow in the flame. The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Worldly Wisdom Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this- although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'.

Friedrich Nietzsche
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah — that is essentially Jewish.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.

Friedrich Nietzsche
There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. … He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.—Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.

Friedrich Nietzsche